Adagio

Compared to the stars, humans are hardly breaths in the Universe. Imagine humming birds, dying in two short years, their humming bodies burning sugar to power their humming hearts. Imagine butterflies living days and leaving only fragile wings and powder behind. Imagine the heavy particles smashed to life in the heart of the Hadron Collider and gone, in less than seconds.

Imagine a star, ten billion years old, on the edge of its deadline. Imagine a smaller star, a dwarf, with some warranty left to go. Imagine a blue giant, a mere billion years and burning blue and sure to blow a big blue nova clear out the end of its solar system.

Imagine that solar system, bereft of its sol. Just a system, cold planets, asteroids gently leaving, carbon set loose in the Universe.

Imagine the heavy elements formed in the hearts of the hydrogen smashers, the complicated chemicals speeding at a fraction of light’s limit, colliding with planets. Barren rocks seasoned with space’s castaways, abiogenetic flowers transmuted by the humming soil to feed humming birds. Imagine pollen blowing clear out the end of its meadow, the butterflies it blows away. Imagine the butterfly alighting on your hand and the smell of the summer day, a winged dwarf with some warranty left to go, soon taken by the breeze.

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"All the while I have been forgetting the third of my reasons for remaining so faithful a citizen of the Federation, despite all the lascivious inducements from expatriates to follow them beyond the seas, and all the surly suggestions from patriots that I succumb. It is for the reason which grows out of my medieval but unashamed taste for the bizarre and indelicate, my congenital weakness for comedy of the grosser varieties. The United States, to my eye, is incomparably the greatest show on earth."